The Transporter Refueled [2015] ★★

Alright folks let’s play a fun game called “Can you tell the Transporters movies apart?”. Probably not. So to make things easier, Hollywood replaced Jason Statham with the much younger Ed Skrein as former special-ops mercenary Frank Martin. His latest mission? Help a femme-fatale and her three partners get revenge against a sinister Russian kingpin. Not an easy task. But if you’ve seen the previous movies, you probably know that Martin doesn’t go down easily. And that’s the trouble with “The Transporter” series. You know where it’s going every step of the way. And yet director Camille Delamarre, working from a script written by 3 people (yes, it took 3 people to write an action flick), stages some blood pumping chase scenes that will probably satisfy fans of the genre. But even die-hard fans of the series will have to admit that Statham is sorely missed here. Skrein doesn’t do a bad job, but what the people behind this movie don’t seem to realize is that Statham IS The Transporter. Even when things didn’t go exactly well in the previous sequels, Jason was always dynamite. Skrein? Not so much. Same goes for the movie.